I serve as a member of CV's Building Leadership Team (BLT) and participate in weekly PLCs (typically with the English department). It's important to me to be involved in different parts of our building. BLT provides me an opportunity to hear about the happenings and decision-making for our building as a whole. By participating in the weekly PLCs, I am also able to have a pulse on what the instructional and academic needs are in parts of our building and work to fill them through the library programming, purchasing, and instructional collaboration. While these meetings take time out of my day and mean time away from the library, they are a priority for me to stay plugged into the building at large.  Additionally, I participate in the summer lead retreats or any required trainings and conferences for leads in our building. 

My assistant and I meet once a month to plan for the upcoming month. I have been working to formalize this meeting so that we have a more concrete action steps and timelines for work that needs to get done. I have organized our work into the following categories:

• Displays

• Programming (crafts, activities, clubs)

• Outreach/Teacher Supports (pushing into classrooms)

• In-House (classroom visits, collaborations, etc.)

• Library Management Projects 

• Professional Development & Learning

These categories represent our priorities and I am mindful of making sure that we have at least one project in each section to continue to push and grow our practice. 

We will continue to formalize and tweak this process as we go. You can read more about our meeting protocol in the Leadership Professional Development Pathway section below. 

Each August, I come back to school to work with our new teachers to help orient them to our library and its resources. 

I add each new teacher to our Canvas Library page and help them understand the workflow for various resources they need like:

• Lamination and butcher paper requests

• Reserving time/space in the library

• Checking out textbooks/novel sets/calculators

The document also outlines all of the different ways that I can support them in their classroom instruction. I am able to do things like "Database Matchmaking," taking your project and making recommendations about the best places for students to find relevant information, "Resource Cultivation" where I can pull together readings and resources for students on a particular topic or theme, "Book Talks, Tastings, and Bookmobile Visits" where I can support choice reading or book circles. (You can read more about the instructional supports I provide on the Instruction page.)

At CVHS, students and educators tend to follow the mantra "When in doubt, go to the library." It's an honor that our school sees us as a first point of contact for problem-solving and finding solutions. By participating in so many PLCs and meetings across our building, I am able to hear what our teachers and students need (resources, tools, strategies, materials, etc.) and can work to fill those needs through library programming, purchasing and budgeting, collaborations and co-teaching with teachers, etc. My participation in the structures of leadership at CV makes me a more responsive librarian. 

This year, our principal and I touched base about a need that came up in a meeting she facilitated. One of our PD pathways focuses on Supporting Struggling Students (primarily focused on students on IEPs/504s or with English Language supports). Teachers and case managers expressed a need for more robust audiobook solutions for students with audiobook accommodations. After researching and demo-ing audiobook solutions, my principal and I moved forward with a building-wide subscription to Learning Ally. Now, every student in our building has access to Learning Ally on Canvas and can use audiobooks to support them in their classroom assignments. The implementation of this resource has been a time-consuming project for me and I continue to the the liaison between Learning Ally's team and our building. 

This year, I also began searching for a research tool that could bridge the gap between Google and databases. When students complete research assignments, I oftentimes struggle that they need something as current as Google but as reliable as the databases. Then, I found Sooth.fyi. This is a student-facing search engine that links to reliable sources only. I took it upon myself to learn the ins and outs of Sooth, submit it for approval at the district, and make it available to students at CV. I am so proud to have brought this tool to CV -- it has already made a huge impact on student learning and access to quality resources. 

All of these new resources are linked and easily accessible for students on the CVHS Library Canvas page (on left). 

As mentioned above, this year we added several new technology resources to our building. I knew that teachers needed to understand the tools so that they could implement them in their classrooms.

As soon as our Sooth account was live, I organized Lunch and Learn mini PD sessions for our English and Social Studies departments to help them understand the features of Sooth. 

In preparation, I dug into Sooth -- watching all of the tutorials, Zooming with their team to get questions answered, and asking myself what I would want to know if I was a teacher getting ready to use it with students. I built a shared Google folder where my teachers could see its features including:

• How Sooth and Databases are similar/different (they don't replace one another)

• How media bias is rated (according to AllSides)

• How reliability and transparency of sources is rated (according to NewGuard)

• Symbols students will see on Sooth and what they mean

• Source types available on Sooth 

During the Lunch and Learns, I did a live demonstration of the various features of Sooth and then department members had an opportunity to discuss how they might use the tool in their classrooms. 

Sooth now has a spot on the Library Canvas page and teacher continually tell me they see students accessing it -- unprompted -- and that it's been a game-changer in their instructional practice and assignments. 

Our Science department was unable to find a time for a collective lunch meeting, so I turned the content of my presentation into a video and sent it to the science teachers with other resources to support them with Sooth.

Our school allows educators to select a PD pathway that best fits their professional goals and interests. In the 2025-2026 school year, I knew that I wanted to grow my leadership skills, so I signed up for our PD Leadership Pathway. In this pathway, I read The Art of Coaching Teams and participated in a variety of leadership activities including: observing PLCs across our building, creating protocols to support struggling teams, observing classroom teachers, and learning about addressing conflict, disillusionment, and strategies for providing feedback to teams. 

As part of this PD Pathway, I was required to create a meeting protocol to support a struggling team. 

The library team isn't exactly a "struggling" team, but I want to see us improve our efficiency by more clearly taking on projects/work independently and planning ahead to get good work done. 

After fall break, our team began meeting more regularly to touch base about all of the different programming, displays, purchasing, outreach, co-teaching, collaboration projects that we have each month. 

This PD coursework will continue through the spring and give me the opportunity to:

• Observe classroom teachers (provide walkthrough feedback, debrief one-on-one with teachers, etc.) 

• Read and reflect on/discuss articles with my colleagues

Each November, our content leads go through the process of proposing a budget of instructional needs and instructional wants for the following school year. I thought it would be valuable to build a system to support department budget-building in our school. I knew, as the manager of textbooks and novel sets, that many of our departments were likely unaware of the state of their textbooks that are stored in the library.  Many high schools in our district have a designated "Textbook Manager" on staff in the library. In our building, I do our textbook management.

In April 2025, I completed an inventory of our textbook room. Based on that information and historical circulation data for textbook sets, I pulled together a budget recommendation document for each department. 

Each content lead received an email from me explaining my recommendations (sample here). 

In the email, I provided a link to their budget recommendation document (sample here).

Based on department decisions, I was able to weed books in time for our yearly book recycling date (always in November) and make room for new titles purchased by departments. It was empowering to communicate with departments proactively about what their departments might need to purchase for or remove from the textbook room.

In my tenure as Teacher Librarian, I have volunteered and served on interview committees for the following roles:

• Assistant Principal (x2)

• Dean

• Computer Support Technician (CST) Assistant

While interviews are time-consuming, I think it's important for prospective candidates (especially in leadership positions) to understand that the library is a stakeholder in the future of our building. 

In the 2025-2026 school year, the high school librarians from DCSD started our own PLC. Together, we scheduled a weekly meeting with time to discuss our goals: increasing library circulation through building a culture of reading (Semester 1) and improving our research lessons and teaching strategies (Semester 2). 

Together, we have taken the initiative to meet on professional development days and make our own agendas to help us collaborate across the district. I love the professional development opportunities planned for us by the district, but we wanted to have more regular time to collaborate and share best practices. This weekly meeting has become a favorite part of my week and has been a great way for us to brainstorm together. 

I hope that next year we can formalize our collective agreements and agendas to better align with the four questions of PLCs. (Right now, we try to cram in all of our collaboration, business-y conversations, and PLCs into one meeting and I'd like us to solidify our PLC model. 

I submitted a proposal to speak at our district librarian kickoff. I facilitated a session titled: A Collection for All: Increasing Language Representation in Your Library. In my presentation, I offered my framework for expanding the Spanish language section in my library as a blueprint for librarians who wanted to expand the linguistic representation in their own libraries. I was able to outline how I used data to support the need of Spanish titles in my library, how we secured outside funding to support the project, and how we marketed our collection to be a resource for teachers at Castle View and in the district at-large. This was my first professional presentation and it was so rewarding to share my hard work with my colleagues.

After attending my session, one of my high school librarian colleagues has begun building a Ukranian-language section in her library to better support the needs of refugee and immigrant students in her building. Together, we're working to ensure that -- across our district -- students have access to the books that best fit their linguistic needs and wants. 

You can see my slide deck here. 

Throughout my time as an English teacher, department lead, and the Teacher Librarian, I have been actively involved in the district book approval process. I believe that our students deserved more contemporary, engaging texts in the classroom. As a department, we dreamed about what titles we wanted to use in the classroom and systematically came up with a plan to get them approved through the district policy. It's rewarding to go through the approval process, purchase copies of the text for our building, and see students read (and oftentimes love) the books. 

This spring, we are hoping to move a few more titles through the approval process after finding new titles that sparked our interested at the NCTE conference. 

This work benefits all students in DCSD because it opens up instructional opportunities for teachers across the building. I see the approval process as a goodwill effort that benefits students through relevant and engaging learning across our district. 

I have worked directly with DCSD's IT department to get two new resources approved for students in DCSD.

Last year, I worked to get a Kobo e-Reader approved for student use in DCSD. Many of our high school students don't like reading on a screen. They prefer checking out a physical book over reading on their phone or computer. Increasingly, our teachers are trying to put boundaries on student phone and computer use in the classroom. We researched which type of e-Reader would be accessible for high school students. We wanted the students to be able to borrow books through Sora/Overdrive and knew that we didn't want them to have to have an Amazon account (for Kindle) to download books. Kobo e- Readers are in color and allow students to highlight as they read. Ultimately, we landed on a Kobo as the best e Reader for our students. We submitted paperwork with the IT department to get a Kobo e-Reader approved. While we were successful, we did not receive a grant where we had hoped to pilot a little fleet of e-Readers for our building. Regardless, I hope that the Kobo approval will benefit students across DCSD. 

This year, I worked with district IT again to get a new software approved for students in DCSD. I wanted to add Sooth.fyi to our district list of approved software. Sooth is a student-facing search engine that provides students with highly credible, reliable sources. One of the IT team members was impressed with Sooth and its high standards for student privacy and knew that it would be approved immediately. All students at CVHS have access to Sooth and I hope that other schools in DCSD will use this new software!

This spring, one of our building's PLS reached out to me asking if I would be willing to provide some book titles to another school in the district. That school's PLS reached out to ours needing dystopian book circle titles for his English department. 

Within a few hours of making contact, I pulled together a comprehensive list of high-interest dystopian novels for the English department to consider. I organized them by reading level, listed whether or not they were approved for full-class reading in DCSD, outlined if there were copies available across the district, and gave a brief blurb about what types of students might be drawn to each title. 

I heard back immediately, "my school is a cool place but we are too small to the benefit of an awesome librarian since we don't have a library : )" and said "Our kids will greatly benefit from your expertise :)"  He later followed up and told me that his students picked Neal Shusterman's Unwind. 

This brief collaborative opportunity was one of my favorite interactions this year! I love that my PLS believe I have the knowledge and capacity to help out and collaborate for the benefit of students across the district, and it was rewarding to share my knowledge with someone who needed it. I hope we will get the chance to collaborate more in the future. 

The CVHS library is staffed with a full time library assistant. This position gives me the flexibility to get into classrooms, work across our building, and not be tied to the ins-and-outs of library management each day. Having full-time coverage in the library allows me to be an active participant in our building PLCs, my district librarian weekly PLC, and be on our Building Leadership Team. All of these meetings happen when students need supervision in the library, so I couldn't commit to these meetings without coverage. My assistant is a perfect fit for this role. She leads her own book club, loves to book talk when classes come to the library, and reads voraciously. She is organized and creative, making our library simultaneously tidy and whimsical. She is a huge asset and makes our library a great place for students and staff. 

I was recently recognized as the Apple Award Representative for CVHS for the 2025-2026 school year and as the Saber Blazer winner (thus the bright red, oversized blazer) for our building. 

The Apple Awards is a Douglas County School District award ceremony where teachers and staff are recognized for their outstanding contributions to their schools and the district. 

Here is a picture of me and (some of) the CVHS administrative team after receiving the news that I was our representative!